William Sharpington

William Sharpington (1900–1973) was a British lettering artist who worked in sign painting and the design of monuments. In the view of John Nash and Gerald Fleuss, his workshop "produced, from the [1940s] to the [1960s], some of the most distinguished public lettering in England".

Early life
The son of a baker, Sharpington studied at the City and Guilds of London Art School and started his career working as an assistant in the workshop of Percy Delf Smith from about 1920 to 1935. He then set up his own practice which continued through the post-war period. At the time it was normal to use custom painted or carved lettering for large signs because of the inflexibility of printing large fonts using letterpress, before the arrival of large-size printing technologies like vinyl sign cutters and computer fonts.

Career
Delf Smith and his teacher Edward Johnston, influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, had established a style of fine lettering rooted in Roman square capitals which had quickly become a standard for prestigious lettering like monuments and memorials. Sharpington also worked in this style, with use of italics, calligraphy and swashes. Nick Garrett, a modern signwriter, comments that "I had worked alongside his lettering in the House of Lords some years earlier and they left such a lasting impression ... Sharpington's work is of course notably classical, yet each letter was made from his own passion for calligraphic rendering. The structures are strongly reminiscent of the original Trajan (Roman) and Jensen (Venetian) inspirational characters" and that Sharpington's style "is very different to the Italian Trajan style. It has a calligraphic voice crafted around its cultural and architectural context."

Lettering examples by Sharpington are held by the Crafts Study Centre.

Sharpington designed lettering art such as memorials and painted signs himself, but generally drew out art for others to cut into stone. He taught and had his workshop at the City and Guilds of London Art School and was a member of the Art Workers' Guild. His assistants and subcontractors included Kenneth Breese, Ron Burnett, Bob DuVivier and Donald Jackson and his pupils included Michael Renton, Vera Ibbett and Stephen Lubell, whose article on him made with Burnett's assistance is one of the main sources on his life.

Sharpington was a Freemason in a lodge with Oliver, and later with Jackson. He died in 1973 and was commemorated with a plaque at St Bride's Church, a former client.

Legacy
Much of Sharpington's artwork was painted or made of wood and ephemeral, like signs for London County Council for schools and vaccination clinics (even as mundane as a "No Parking" sign to go at the entrance to a North London park). As a result, much of it no longer exists: by 1989 Dr. John Nash commented that "much of the beautiful work done by Sharpington's workshop during the Fifties is now gone". (Giving a memorial lecture to Delf Smith in 1946, M. C. Oliver commented that Sharpington "specializes in painted lettering of fine quality". ) In addition, tastes changed and the practice of signwriting declined after his career, meaning his work was often not replaced with similar designs.

However, photographs exist of some of his lost work and other examples survive which were made of stone or kept indoors in protected locations such as government buildings and churches. The Diocese of Southwark archives list correspondence with him on various projects.

Extant work

 * London Scottish Regiment Chapel, St Columba's Church, London
 * Memorial to John Collis Browne, Ramsgate, Kent (1973)
 * British Museum, staff war memorial (1939–1945 section only; the First World War section is by Eric Gill)
 * War memorial, interior of St Anne's Church, Kew
 * Memorial to Sir Theodore Chambers, Parkway, Welwyn Garden City, monument designed by Louis de Soissons (c. 1961)
 * Roosevelt Memorial, Grosvenor Square, lettering
 * Plaque marking York Water Gate, Victoria Embankment Gardens
 * A History of English Life (1936), book, lettering on maps and charts
 * Memorial to Edith Somerville and Violet Florence Martin, Saint Barrahane's Church, Castletownshend, Ireland